Poetry Drawer: Tertiary Privilege: Eating Chicken Bones And Broth With An Old Gypsy Voodoo Woman Outside Of Shreveport: Rule Number One – Location by R. Gerry Fabian

Tertiary Privilege

It is a marvellous Memphis evening
and as I get on the trolley,
I catch an immediate glimpse of her.
While I deposit my money,
I find her fixing breakfast
with those soft blue eyes shining.
During the day, I call
just to her the lilt in her voice.
At supper,
I envy the lettuce
that feels the taste
of her soft lips and wet tongue.
I lie in bed
awaiting her gentle slide into bed
nuzzling her silken skin next to mine.

The trolley jerks to a start.
She is in her middle twenties
and as I am approaching social security.
The best I can do is smile
and sit across form her
hoping a breeze
will carry a breath of her perfume
at least
until her stop.

Eating Chicken Bones And Broth
With An Old Gypsy Voodoo Woman
Outside Of Shreveport

She pulls the carcass
out of the boiling water
placing it on a plate filled
with herbs, spices and root powders.
Breaking off a steaming rib bone
with her wrinkled thumb and forefinger,
she fries with, in a herb based olive oil.
Eat this for fortitude.
Using razor sharp shears,
she cuts the shoulder blade apart
and grinds it into a damp powder.
Dumping it into a pan of boiling water
which contains three magical ground roots,
she pours it into a blue metal cup.
Drink this for humility.
Using wooden tongs, she extracts
a bare chicken wing from the broth.
This she mashes into a paste
and spreads it across
a slice of French bread.
Chew this for moments of indecision.
Finally, she strains the remaining stock
through a metal mesh
and then again
through old cheesecloth
into a chipped ceramic bowl.
Into the bowl, she sprinkles five love herbs:
lavender, basil, rosemary, hibiscus and patchouli.
This she pours into a pint bottle and corks it.
Sip this and kiss your intended lover.
The depth of love will be revealed.

Rule Number One – Location

She likes to make breakfast
for poor people.
Even before the rooster,
she’s up
collecting, banging and frying.

When it’s all done
she drives to the station
and sets up her booth.

The poor people hate her.
The food is overcooked
and usually on the cold side.

She’s a braggart and a gossip.
A big hand-lettered sign
informs – NO CREDIT.

Still her prices are cheap
and she does well.

More poems by R. Gerry Fabian on Ink Pantry

R. Gerry Fabian is a retired English instructor. He has been publishing poetry since 1972 in various poetry magazines. He is the editor of Raw Dog Press. He has published two poetry books, Parallels and Coming Out Of The Atlantic. His novels, Memphis MasqueradeGetting Lucky (The Story) and Seventh Sense are available from Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble. He is currently working on his fourth novel, Ghost Girl.

Poetry Drawer: Autumnal: A daughter takes after her father: Yonder: Deeds by Dr. Susie Gharib

Autumnal

Water is my element,
hence the Summer became a girlhood’s favourite scene,
heralding swimming, boats and vanilla ice-cream,
but it took English Studies in my late teens
to make me enamored with autumnal traits.

Grey became imbued with a literary hue,
with the Brontës roaming the Yorkshire moors,
the Romantics in melancholic moods,
and the Graveyard poets contemplating mortality amid tombstones.

My book cover of Wuthering Heights showed a Byronic hero
against a livid wold.
The wind howled in my soul.
No distance could estrange Catherine and Heathcliff
who taught me spiritual fortitude.

And dark clouds that omens forebode
began to change their dismal discourse
since what blessed Coleridge’s ancient mariner with rain-outpours
evoked the very spirits that sent the frozen ship on its course
though no breeze breathed or spoke,
a metaphor for divine intervention
despite the transgression of an errant soul.

The elms so thinned by Blair’s rude winds
not even two crows could build a dwelling
now mirror the nudity of my old age,
shedding its sorrows and tenacious grief,
preparing for the flight beyond the grave.

A daughter takes after her father

When I was nine years old, I pouted my lips
to blow a tune through his trumpet,
my hands unsteady beneath its weight.

At seventeen, I puffed at his pipe.
liked neither its taste nor its swirling clouds.
It merely imbued me with fatherly pride.

He always pondered over his books,
his bent back indicative of a speculative mood,
inspiring my long spells of solitude.

He tended the wounds of stranded birds.
A recuperative hand became his trait
that lent to mine an addiction to aid.

The shades of blue he constantly wore
evoking the sea that buffeted our boat
have left the flow that ripples my thoughts.

Yonder

I catch a glimpse of the vibrant yonder,
a radiant house that sleeps beneath
a fluttering, yellow maple tree,
a lake seducing the lucent moon
to quiver on its heaving bosom,
a lawn on whose silken skin
pirouettes a barefooted nymph,
a dray of squirrels that emptied nuts
of all their sealed contents,
a herd of horses who’ve never been ridden,
a flock of sheep that roam un-chidden,
a cluster of violets awaiting a breeze
to caress each enraptured face,
a shadow that saunters all alone
longing to mingle with my own.

Deeds

What deeds have you deleted from your subterranean archives,
the ones you keep in your subconscious, diaries, and half-written memoirs?
Torturing, when a child, a clan of ants,
locking butterflies in tight-shut jars,
peeping though keyholes at a neighbour’s wife,
compromising savings by stealing a dime,
seducing a schoolmate with a fake smile,
wetting your bed in the middle of the night,
playing the heroic when you are afraid to die,
breaking every promise your tongue contrived,
slighting many a devoted friend,
adhering blindly to a deadly trend,
attempting suicide for a frivolous wench,
accusing falsely to shirk a debt!
I always marvel at the scale of events
deleted from CVs, bios, and self-narratives.

More poems by Dr. Susie Gharib on Ink Pantry

Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.

Poetry Drawer: The Unburnt Toast by Fizza Abbas

Unravel the mystery of the half-burnt toast
a slice of brown bread that couldn’t succumb to fire.

One day you’ll know what it means.

A pale, brown woman with unkempt tresses
walks along the pavement. The asphalt and concrete cracked with age:
A barren thoroughfare of desires – A road to hell in-the-making

Her black eyes look around
the remnants of a half-eaten apple look tempting.

She hides it secretly inside her cleavage –
A feeble attempt at a brutal revenge
those once altruistic soldiers become mannequins.

My poor Pakistani mother in a slum
too has feelings, too has rage.

They say have patience, you will get the aid you deserve.

Don’t they know the toast has burnt and the jam is now wet?

Fizza Abbas is a Freelance Content Writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her works have been published on quite a few platforms including Poetry Village and Poetry Pacific.

Poetry Drawer: Father’s Days by Robert Demaree

A well-known poet was doing a reading in New Hampshire. He started to read a poem about his father. After about three lines, he stopped and looked up at us: “After all these years,” he said, “you’d think I would have this figured out.” But of course you don’t.

My Father’s Toolbox

My father was not much at fixing things
But he had a tool box,
The colour of an Army Jeep,
Marvellous nest of compartments,
Secret places for wrenches and chisels,
Trays for bolts, screws,
Nails of different size.
It still sits in the guest-room closet,
Artifact of wonder
To a childhood on the pond,
Seventy summers ago.

I do not have a toolbox
And few tools, beyond those:
A plastic container with
A screwdriver, the little hammer
My great-aunt used
To pound away at pewter.
And a heavy-duty staple gun,
Mightiest instrument I ever used.

We did not have sons.
Our daughters learned
To repair some things
And married men
Who could fix others.

His Gradebook

I came upon my father’s gradebook today,
On the cottage shelf
Where we left it when he died,
Twenty years ago now.
I wish that he’d retired
While his memories were all good ones.
I see him in his classroom by the pond,
Leaning forward, wanting to tell a boy or two,
Sullen, not unkind, needing credits,
About the Generation of ’98,
But struggling with the preterite, I think.
Then the meaning comes to me:
A tutor is someone who keeps you safe.

Third Sunday in June

Of the Father’s Days
In my growing up
I remember
Inexpensive after-shave
And 45’s that turned out
Not to be the Dixieland he loved;
Yet his smile showed thanks for my intent.

So it did not seem such irony
That the week before Father’s Day this year
We took him to the “rest home,”
(Curious euphemism, that):
Entrepreneurial caregivers,
Protestant ministers,
Meaning well enough, I suppose:
They cannot tell us a theology of Alzheimer’s.
Early on Sunday morning,
Father’s Day,
They took him to the emergency room;
Four days later,
Shortly after lunch,
With Mother and me there with him,
He dozed off into eternity,
Slipped loose at last
From that most outrageous of diseases.
I had few tears left for
The funeral home, the cemetery.
I left them all at Elmhurst,
In his little room, his chair,
In the grand confusion
Of the end of his days,
Left there by those who cared for him most.

The monitor above his bed
Went blank:
A shrill, dull monotone,
Solid amber line across the screen;
On the shelf below, greeting cards
From cousins he could not have named
And an unopened bottle of Williams Aqua Velva.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

Poetry Drawer: At Exit 50; The Shade Oak; Wedding Song by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: REQUIEM FOR A DEAD COMPUTER by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: Turnover: Foliage Tour by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: At The Post Office by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: Probabilities of Living by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: New Organ by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: In The ICU: Lakefront Property: Prognosis by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: The Bartender’s Tale: Approaching 82 by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: Golden Shovel Exercise: Chateau Frontenac by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: Rush Week: Knowledge by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: The Trouble with Pronouns: Basket Weave by Robert Demaree

Poetry Drawer: Resignation letter: Going back to London: Ice cream: Describing Cheryl: The bait by D.S. Maolalai

Resignation letter

the office they gave me
held a view
of birds. how then
should one focus
on scheduling appointments
and booking calls
with contractors? flight stretched
like a long arm
over mountains
and tangled tablecloth.

Going back to London

it looks like I’m going
to be going again –
something in my life
bringing me back to London.
it’s not weather, god no,
and I’ve no friends
I want to see; I lived it a time, it’s true
and have some happy memories
but none of those
will light my way tonight.

me and this girl
are renting a car,
taking it from Bristol
all across the country. she
has appointments
she has to keep or something.
something to do
with a visa.
I’m going along
because I like to drive
and want to see
if some barstaff there
remember me.

there was this place I used to go to –
in Camden. I lived in Golders
and it was handy, that’s all. they played
folk music,
and sometimes jazz. I got drunk there
most nights that I got drunk.
it was pretty good. once
someone thought I was an A&R man
and set me up –
free drinks all night.
the walls
were a squeezed waterbottle
and the air
blue
as fruit.

me and this girl are going to London.
we’re going tomorrow morning. it’s
June now, and the weather’s looking fine. I’m angling
that we drive along the coast, even though it means
getting up early. we’ll go east, our eyes
flying to sunrise
and Paris
will be rising
to our right.

Ice cream

she is sitting
on the ground
outside of tesco.

she is sitting
with legs flat,
taking
little licks
off the top
of an ice cream
cone.

she looks
about six.
she looks
about happy.
her dad
or someone
on a bench nearby
pouring down
a bottle.
the sun is out.
it’s summer.

she looks happy.
I go on in,
buy vegetables and bread,
fresh fish and wine.
when I come out
she’s still there,
eating her ice cream.

Describing Cheryl

Cheryl;
black as a red cherry
plucked out
of a blue earth,
good a fuck as any animal,
clever as candlewax,
ambitious as a bee in spring.

look:
I tried so long
to reduce you
down to an essence in poems
and now I feel like you need an apology –
look at the shaggy order
into which I’ve put things.

The bait

my mam says she likes
about half the things
I publish – she is very
honest
when she likes something. when she doesn’t –
that is to say
when it’s one of those poems
about drinking
or the ones
about chasing girls –
she’s honest too,
in a different way,

saying
“well done”
quietly
and going on
eating her dinner.

sometimes she asks
why I don’t
write the nicer poems
all the time
to which I don’t really
have a response.

when you drop some bread on the pavement
in a crowd of flocking birds
you don’t get to decide
if a starling will get it
or a seagull.

.
.
.
.
.

D.S. Maolalai a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and recently returned there after four years abroad in the UK and Canada. D.S. has been writing poetry and short fiction for the past five or six years with some success. Writing has appeared in such publications as 4’33’, Strange Bounce and Bong is Bard, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Out of Ours, The Eunoia Review, Kerouac’s Dog, More Said Than Done, Star Tips, Myths Magazine, Ariadne’s Thread, The Belleville Park Pages, Killing the Angel and Unrorean Broadsheet, by whom D.S. was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Work is published in two collections; Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden and Sad Havoc Among the Birds.

Poetry Drawer: An evening, after 3 months sobriety by DS Maolalai

Poetry Drawer: Like a little drum by D.S. Maolalai

Poetry Drawer: Advice from Miles Davis to all the poets I know by D.S. Maolalai

Poetry Drawer: Miriam by D.S. Maolalai

Poetry Drawer: A wildness of wine by D.S. Maolalai

Poetry Drawer: Sonnet CCLXV: Her Pal by Terry Brinkman

Sonnet CCLXV

Mauna stuck in a bottle-neck light
Over her shoulder fly’s a peacock
That’s not COVID aloha for you to rock
How many hearts broken at twilight
Steams of coffee drinking all night
Un-shed tears of a lonely hawk
Shadow-less early morning flintlock
Midnight is my time for walking until daylight
Meadow of a murmuring lizard
Lonely silence of a duck’s quack
Star thrown shadows of a blizzard
Unmentionables torn from the back
Like a grasshopper sticking in the hat of a wizard
Sun was nearing the steeple of Jack

Her Pal

Her pal wears an alabaster grass Ball-Dress to write
Improper overtures of COVID from men
Writing with Tortoiseshell Pens
Gaps between shutters for light
Frost- bound Coachman arrived at midnight
We needed him at ten
Swelling caves aloha in silk hose until then
Insulting to any lady’s double-envelops white

Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. He started creating poems. He has five Amazon E- Books. also poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed, Jute Milieu Lit and Utah Life Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, In Parentheses, Adelaide Magazine, UN/Tethered Anthology and the Writing Disorder.

Poetry Drawer: Vitality of Literature: Motion & Stillness in Rustbelt City (Buffalo, NY): Antipoem: Depression: Disintegration by Connor Orrico

Vitality of Literature

Subtending void,
vanished time,
actualizing
my absence.

Sempiternal words
created life —
please preserve
my presence.

Motion & Stillness in Rustbelt City (Buffalo, NY)

Seeking the heart of a city
may be a false quest:
is not each human heart,
each structure
in the built environment,
each shape and flow
of the natural world
suffused with
the peace and chaos of urban life
irreducible constituents of
the heart of a city,
pulsating in balance
the life and death of everything,
unable to be localized
to any one place?

How foolish the human spirit is
to seek something
which cannot be found.
How foolish I was to find myself
at the Civil War monument
beneath the gaze of the Union
and her soldiers and sailors,
seeking understanding
in the interlocutions,
the laughter,
the sparrows,
the comings and goings,
the flags and music
moving on the wind
to the play of children.

Always 15 minutes away
from wherever you need to be
as the saying goes —
pockets for pedestrians
swallowed by highways
over a motor abyss
and it is well to be so close
to a friend or work,
coffee breaks or home,
but time piles driving alone,
leading thoughts to unknowns:

Memories of passenger seat
dialogues with a friend now absent,
melancholy towards a concert,
panic attack towards the airport –
thinking of everything in nothing
in the road I travel, engine I use,
person I pass, position I keep,
my future, present, past —
much to remember and forget,
narrating existence through
selves and sounds and cities.

Antipoem

Pseudowritten antipoem,
unbosomed unpoetry,
ubique ubiety:
paradox of plague.

Depression

Contentment visits
as I extricate
myself from sleep

before memory
of being human
draws me back

to music silenced
beneath behemoths
of how we hurt each other,

our shared sought love
that casts out fear
like eager arms of children.

Disintegration

In early morning still
I sing myself to sleep,
fractal music scattered
as fragmented hymnary,

inhabiting
space ceded
by silence
and its static,

inhibiting
the self I was
and am and
will become,

inheriting
some creation
of my own
disharmony,

inhuming
stone sundered
while sculpturing
sciamachy.

Connor Orrico is a student and amateur field recordist interested in global health, mental health, and how we make meaning from the stories of person and place we share with each other, themes which are explored in his words in The CollidescopeBurning House Press, and Headline Poetry & Press, as well as his sounds at Bivouac Recording.

Books From The Pantry: Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters With Syrian Refugees: drawn and recorded by Olivier Kugler: reviewed by Kev Milsom

In December, 2013, I travelled together with Julien Rey from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) to Domiz Refugee Camp (Kurdistan, Iraq). Accompanied by two Syrian Kurds, Mazen and Amer, who helped us with translations, we met open-hearted people who invited us into their tents and houses where they told us, over a cup of tea, about their lives back home, their escape from Syria and about the living conditions in the camp. My opening words to the people I met were, “Hello, my name is Olivier Kugler. I am a German Reportage Illustrator, based in London. Médecins Sans Frontières commissioned me to portray Syrian refugees in order to help raise awareness about their situation. May I interview and take photos of you? ’ The photos won’t be published, but I need them as reference for my drawings.

For most of us, it would be fair to state that 2020 has not been the greatest year within living memory. At times, surrealism has merged into a new form of normality; not aided by the notion that things may perhaps get a lot worse before they start to get back to any form of what we perceive to be everyday ‘normal’. At such times, it’s important for us to realise and recognise that while we may have to don a face mask and perhaps queue a short while to enter a well-stocked supermarket, for others across our planet their lives have been shrouded in the darkest, deepest surrealism for a long while. Likewise, as we look forward to future halcyon days when we can again flock en masse toward sunlit beaches, or travel on public transport without the aid of any damn irritating facial armour, for some people this level of normality is lost in time and may never return.  

The 2018 book, Escaping Wars and Waves (Myriad) allows us multiple, enlightening glimpses into the daily lives of people torn from their homeland and forced into new, uncertain lives. Put simply, it is a book of highly educational words and inspirational illustrations. Every page is packed with sketches of the people Olivier Kugler met between 2013 and 2017, as he followed the trails of refugees fleeing from Syria, into neighbouring countries and further onward toward Europe.

Every page portrays a harrowing personal story. In Iraq, we meet some psychologists who have formed a mental health team to care for refugees. Their plight is tough, for Syrian men tend to view any offer to aid their mental health as an affront to their masculinity. Similarly, Syrian women are not comfortable with any aspect of psychology improving their personal well being, although some women do come into the mental health unit, sometimes using their children’s medical needs as the main reason for attendance. One of the centre’s psychologists, Ahin, shares her thoughts concerning her child, Kawa. 

The happiest day of my life was when Kawa, my baby boy, was born. He is seven months old now. We would love to go back to Quamishli where my parents are. They haven’t met their grandson yet. Every night, before I put Kawa to bed, I tell him how beautiful Syria is.

Still in Iraq, Olivier was waiting for a translator to join him, in snowfall and freezing temperatures. A local man, Muhamed, took pity on the shivering illustrator and gave him hot coffee from his roadside stand; sternly refusing any payment. Muhamed is 55 and fled Syria 15 months ago. One day, a helicopter appeared and randomly began destroying houses in his Damascus street. Muhamed, his wife and daughters barely escaped with their lives as their home was flattened by a bomb. They ran with only the clothes they were wearing. He cries when he speaks of his wife. She is severely depressed and no medication is available for her. 

One Syrian lady, Vian, does visit the mental health team here. Her husband had been arrested 16 months earlier. She has not seen him since. Their youngest son was born only 7 months ago. She is unsure if he will ever get to meet his father. 

Some younger refugees struggle to make the best of their situations in the Iranian refugee camp. Djwan has found a living, renting out some sound equipment. He earns around £30 – £50 for each rental. He also supplies chairs so that people can sit and listen to music. To raise morale, he teaches break-dancing in the camp. In Syria, he had been in the army but escaped, along with several others. 

Many of my friends died. During one mission in Boyedah, I was on a roof, surveying the area. A man tried to kill our colonel. I was calling and screaming at my comrades for help. Moments later, a rocket-propelled grenade was launched and hit the tank dead on…there was a lot of fire. Two of my friends were in the tank. They burned to death. They became ashes.

On the Greek island of Kos, Olivier meets Claudi, a Swiss market trader. She explains that her business profits are down 50% because of the incoming refugees. Locals get nervous around them and she now has to find a trading spot in a quieter location. She says she does not blame the refugees, as they are her friends. Sherine, a physiotherapist from Aleppo, tells Olivier that 30 of her friends and family had escaped from Syria. Half of the group were on Kos. The rest of her group were still in Turkey, still attempting to join them. This had been her 4th attempt to reach Kos. Initially, their boat’s motor had broken. On the second attempt, they were intercepted by pirates at sea, who stole all their fuel. 

The tales of people losing all their money to traffickers is common, with many refugees saying they have given people everything they have to board a boat. Often, the traffickers take all of their money and are never seen again. 

In Calais, France, we find three young Syrian men sharing a simple tent. The point is made to Olivier that Europe is no ‘promised land’. They don’t want to be here and want to get back to their homeland. One poignantly states, ‘I prefer Syria, but without the war’. They say that Médecins Sans Frontières have been exemplary and that Britain gives them most of their food. The men say that initially, the French gendarmes used to catch them trying to escape to Britain and jokingly say, ‘Bad luck, but try again tomorrow’. Now, they are referred to by many as ‘jungle animals’. In Calais, several right-wing fascists regularly attempt to find refugees and badly beat, or cripple them, while stealing everything they own. On his last night in Calais, Olivier meets a confused-looking Afghan gentleman. He has lived in London and wants to get back there. He says sadly, ‘I miss Croydon’.

In the English city of Birmingham, we meet Wisam and his wife, Hadya. Their story is typical of countless others who have literally ran for their lives. They have moved from country to country and felt unwelcome in all. They have been told, ‘Why do you come here? All you do is eat our bread!’. Refugees have been charged up to 10 times the regular price of food, compared to the local population. Back in Syria, it was common practice for soldiers to open fire with machine guns on random houses. Wisam was shot several times in his legs and he is now disabled. Here in Birmingham, with their three children, Wisam and Hadya are beginning to find stability again. In Syria, they had owned a couple of shops, selling beauty products. Wisam was always in work, but one day everything was taken from them and suddenly they had nothing. Wisan got his family free from Syria first and then tried to join up with them. He tells how he paid good money to find a place on a small fishing boat. The capacity for the boat was 150 people. Wisam says there were nearly 500 on the boat when he tried to cross the Mediterranean to get to Italy. Meanwhile, at the same time, Hadya learned that some other boats had capsized and sunk to the bottom of the sea, killing around 800 refugees. She feared one of them was her husband and did not know how to tell their children.

Each story in this book is personal and meaningful. The reality of each refugee’s tale is given face on, with absolutely no sugar-coating. This is what happened. This is how we got here. This is what we have lost. Usually, as Ink Pantry reviewers, we focus on the prose, the grammar and where the writing takes the reader on a literate, creative journey. Here, the writing is nothing less than the often harrowing truth. It simply is. Each illustration on every page is remarkable, because Olivier manages to capture the ‘soul’ of everyone he meets and draws. In a world often tainted by ignorance and lack of awareness, Escaping Wars and Waves should be a mandatory read in schools and libraries, for all children and adults. For anyone who dares to suggest (as I have sadly observed all too often on social media) that these people have ‘deserted’ their country and are therefore ‘cowards’, or even that they are treated lavishly – being given absolutely anything they want – I would simply say, read the book and try…just try…for the very briefest of moments to understand their personal experiences. 

I am very grateful that I had the chance to meet the people I portrayed in my drawings. I feel connected to them and want to thank them very much for their patience and trust. I hope that their circumstances have improved significantly and wish them, and their compatriots, all the best.

Poetry Drawer: Five Poems by Jenny Middleton

Grief

we row, hearing only our oars
pluck the sigh of ripples free
from the lake’s swish of midnight

and silence, lifting water to sudden
cold light, cutting and breaking at the damp
float of moss that clings to the cold

wooden skin of our craft
the stir of sand and silt scurries
beneath us as we pull on,

heavy with grief, our backs turned
from the shore and its familiar
round, worn stones, moving

onwards and away, towards
the tangle of the nearing tree strutted
embankment, its branches open

and different with day.

Sleep- Some Scenarios

  1. Absence.

From the beginning you wept, tossing
and un-soothed, suckling milk
to an exhaustion that gaped
from a hungry, red mouth.

We paced and sang rhyming reels,
running and running their rhythms
amongst the thinning air,
heated by your wails.

Then wings, gentle and absolute
with downy sleep
would brush us and rock us
from such barrenness.

  1. Accidental.

Sofas sag with TV induced stupor
and beer bottles brag of an evening lounge,
gathering in glazed emptiness
on the coffee tables while you sleep,
fully clothed, as the drone of day
spirals fitfully to insubstantial rest.

Later you will jolt awake,
bleary, shirt astray and stumble
against the furniture of the world
stripped to 2AM; stark
with the inconsequence of failure.

  1. Induced.

Sleep arrives in the form of opaline tablets
marooned on a sanitised, metal tray,
each pill an island thudding with escape.

They slip between your waxy lips
and soon breath is a stringy rattle
clambering to the air, while dreams lurch
un-fettered beneath your eye-lids,

unwrapping the last of the world
amongst the dim lights of a hospice ward.

On Worthing Beach

Smooth shingle, rounded by sea,
slides and sinks as we walk,
unevenly as the tide
does in its blinking and glistening
suck at the shore, lapping
us in our race to print the sands.
Its salty rush at us, cool even
in summertime.

The wind full of bluster
and smudges of faraway
fairground jangles
haunts our walk,
intercepting our words
with its stolen sounds.

So even as you push your fingers
against the crevices of my palm
and pull me to you,
we feel the persistence of centuries
echo within the town, the tide
and the gulls’ clasp of the paling sky
ring at us.
Our footsteps vanishing already
to the hold of the land.

Saturday Evening – Suburbia

The trees here are suburban stooges,
the stand-ins for a woodland,
growing in the dim expanse
of a backyard,
their shared vision grown to leaves
and translated, in mob, to the breeze,
their whispered drool in stereo
with the screech
of hand break spins
that greet this neighbourhood
from the supermarket car-park,
where, on evenings like these
its empty space is loot – for some-
to race with; to fill the trivia
of time with
and escapist fumes elude
the labour of trees.
Oxygen and air a cloak
as scarce as day.

I Realised When I Heard Him Play

that instead of talking he was glossing
life to a pop song’s day,
fizzy with vacancy.

While his violin sung of a river;
long notes following long notes
in ripples pushed to air
from the eddy and flurry of water
circling in the dank murk of the weir.

His bow’s strong strokes
alive with sorrow swung
from beneath the current’s keening push
of minnows swum to minim beats
then to semibreves

while his fingers leapt between
fine, taut strings coaxing
music from hollow mahogany
to sing the sadness
of the sentences unsaid.

Jenny Middleton has written poetry throughout her life. Some of this is published in printed anthologies or on online poetry sites. Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can find stray minutes between the chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.  You can read more of her poems at her website.  

Poetry Drawer: Vitality of Literature: Motion & Stillness in Rustbelt City (Buffalo, NY): Antipoem: Depression by Connor Orrico

Vitality of Literature

Subtending void,
vanished time,
actualizing
my absence.

Sempiternal words
created life —
please preserve
my presence.

Motion & Stillness in Rustbelt City (Buffalo, NY)

Seeking the heart of a city
may be a false quest:
is not each human heart,
each structure
in the built environment,
each shape and flow
of the natural world
suffused with
the peace and chaos of urban life
irreducible constituents of
the heart of a city,
pulsating in balance
the life and death of everything,
unable to be localized
to any one place?

How foolish the human spirit is
to seek something
which cannot be found.
How foolish I was to find myself
at the Civil War monument
beneath the gaze of the Union
and her soldiers and sailors,
seeking understanding
in the interlocutions,
the laughter,
the sparrows,
the comings and goings,
the flags and music
moving on the wind
to the play of children.

Always 15 minutes away
from wherever you need to be
as the saying goes —
pockets for pedestrians
swallowed by highways
over a motor abyss
and it is well to be so close
to a friend or work,
coffee breaks or home,
but time piles driving alone,
leading thoughts to unknowns:

Memories of passenger seat
dialogues with a friend now absent,
melancholy towards a concert,
panic attack towards the airport –
thinking of everything in nothing
in the road I travel, engine I use,
person I pass, position I keep,
my future, present, past —
much to remember and forget,
narrating existence through
selves and sounds and cities.

Antipoem

Pseudowritten antipoem,
unbosomed unpoetry,
ubique ubiety:
paradox of plague.

Depression

Contentment visits
as I extricate
myself from sleep

before memory
of being human
draws me back

to music silenced
beneath behemoths
of how we hurt each other,

our shared sought love
that casts out fear
like eager arms of children.

Connor Orrico is a student and amateur field recordist interested in global health, mental health, and how we make meaning from the stories of person and place we share with each other, themes which are explored in his words in The Collidescope, Burning House Press, and Headline Poetry & Press, as well as his sounds at Bivouac Recording.